Foundry has released SmartRoto, an AI rotoscoping add-on for Nuke that fills in the frames between an artist's keyframes. According to Foundry, the tool moves and deforms splines across a shot from a few input frames, while leaving the artist in control of the final shape.
Up to 4x faster. Foundry says SmartRoto can cut rotoscoping time to roughly a quarter of a manual pass.
Runs locally, trained on licensed data. The model processes shots on the artist's own machine, and Foundry says it was trained on licensed footage.
$499 to start. The introductory licence is priced at $499 and rises to $599, with a 90-day trial that closes August 16, 2026.
How SmartRoto handles the in-between frames
Rotoscoping is the manual work of drawing and animating mattes around objects so compositors can isolate them, and it remains one of the most time-intensive tasks in a VFX pipeline. SmartRoto targets the slowest part of that job: the tweening between an artist's keyframes.
The artist still sets up the initial splines and a small number of keyframes. SmartRoto then predicts the intermediate shapes across the sequence, tracking and deforming the splines to follow motion in the plate. Foundry says the artist keeps control throughout and can correct any frame, so the tool assists the roto pass rather than replacing the artist's judgment on tricky edges.
From a DNEG research project to a shipping product
SmartRoto did not start as a product. It began as a Foundry research collaboration with visual effects studio DNEG and the University of Bath, documented in Foundry's own research write-up. The model was trained on DNEG's production rotoscopy artwork, a dataset the team describes as more than 650,000 artist-animated shapes and 125 million keyframes drawn from real shot work.
The research goal was more modest than the launch claim. Ben Kent, a research engineering manager at Foundry, framed the original target as saving "even 25% of an artist's time." The commercial release now advertises up to a 4x speedup, a larger figure that VFX teams will want to test against their own footage before budgeting around it.
Part of Foundry's longer AI build-out in Nuke
SmartRoto lands on top of years of machine learning work inside Nuke. Foundry's AI lineage in the compositor traces back to CopyCat, and the company has kept expanding those capabilities. We covered Nuke 17.0, which added native Gaussian Splat support and broadened its machine learning toolset.
The company has also been buying and building around AI infrastructure. We reported on Foundry's Griptape acquisition, which brought Python-based agent orchestration into its pipeline tools. SmartRoto fits the same pattern: targeted AI applied to a specific, repetitive artist task rather than a general-purpose generator.
AI roto joins a crowded problem space
SmartRoto enters a category where other teams are also attacking hard matte work. We previously covered CorridorKey, the open-source neural keyer that tackles green screen edges many traditional keyers struggle with. Where CorridorKey focuses on keying, SmartRoto focuses on the spline-based roto that artists fall back on when keying is not an option.
For studios weighing it, the practical questions are cost and fit. At an introductory $499 per licence and a local install that keeps footage off external servers, SmartRoto is priced for individual artists and small teams as much as large facilities. The 90-day trial gives roto artists a window to run it against their own shots before the price steps up to $599, and before the August 16, 2026 deadline closes.
